The Fabric of Empire

"An innovative and important study of textiles as texts. Skeehan's genealogy of objects interconnects fabric and print, taking readers on a world tour to reveal how the physical object of fabric became a locus of ideas and emerging changes in world culture and politics. I would give the author the highest praise I can give to an interdisciplinary scholar: I could not tell what her home discipline was."

"This superbly researched, theoretically sophisticated book succeeds brilliantly in circumnavigating four continents and at least a dozen literary and material genres to bring into conversation an astonishing breadth of sources. Textiles truly come alive in this story, recording the knowledge, history, and lived experience of a host of otherwise silent historical actors: enslaved Africans and African Americans, dispossessed Native communities, industrial laboring women, indentured servants, rag pickers, and many more. A timely, bold, and courageous work."

"This riveting study illuminates the bonds between text and textiles in the age of empire. As Skeehan argues for the centrality of fabric and its makers to the story of global modernity, she dismantles colonial legacies in early American studies by unsettling the eminence of book knowledge in favor of an expansive understanding of authorship and intellectual production."

"The Fabric of Empire makes a vital intervention in the study of print culture. Skeehan's brilliant insights into eighteenth-century global textile networks reveal the central role of free and unfree laboring women in the process of modern subject formation. A timely intellectual and literary history that acknowledges its own indebtedness to modern indigenous decolonization and repatriation movements."

"A brilliant and field-changing book. Reading textiles as multifaceted texts, Skeehan reveals new networks of meaning-making in the early Atlantic world and foregrounds the role of enslaved people, Indigenous Americans, and non-elite laborers in these networks. Her magisterial engagement with the material archive of empire yields startling new insight into the politics, aesthetics, and culture of the imperial Atlantic world."